Do you need a better map of your myriad of maps to the territory?

Epistemic Status: first half is so abstract that I have a high degree of confidence, the second half gets progressively more speculative and problematic

TL;DR—The “map and the territory” analogy is recursive: we have mental representations concerning our more fine-grained and situation specific mental representations. This is necessary in order to pick the right method of thinking for a type of situation. However we don’t always pick right (I know I don’t), I wonder what methods we could use to improve these ‘meta-maps’ to better choose which mental representation when?

Was it Alfred Korzybski who popularized the map-territory metaphor of the mind and world—would it be close enough to just say he did? I’m sure most people here know the analogy is the world is the territory, and our mental representation of it is the map. There is also anti-representational cognition^[1]. However, the assumption is that within every living person’s head is a map of the territory (world).

There probably isn’t one map though, there’s a myriad of maps in each adult’s head.

Consider your state or country: there are traditional road maps, subway or metro maps, there’s also bathometric maps, zoning maps, demographic maps, 15 minute city maps. Some maps may be of the same kind but have different projections. Some maps are of higher ratios than others and focus on smaller localities, others may cover the entire country. These could all be maps that point to the same central territory, but all compress it in different ways.

This is analogous (but perhaps doesn’t map directly?) to the different frameworks and mental agents we develop to specialize in certain tasks – over-reliance on one map leads to Kaplan’s Golden Hammer – “give a boy a golden hammer, and he sees everything as a nail.” Everything ailment can be solved by this wonderful panacea – leeches, snakeoil, essential oils, coconut water, the application of Ancient Greek Myths to your anatomy^[2]

To extend the analogy further, if you put too much information on one map then it becomes hard to read and “confusing” – (a map of a city that has lines depicting roads, powerlines, railways, sewers and local government divisions will look like geometric spaghetti), and at a certain point you need to make a decision to transfer part of that information into a specialized map that pertains to a certain function. To paraphrase Aristotle—each class of things we must look for only the precision the subject matter requires, for a carpenter and a geometer investigate a right angle in different ways^[3]. UI and Graphic Design professionals know the struggle is real.

Most people probably have a litany of such specialized maps in their head. This causes an administrative problem about when to access the right maps for the right task. So you might have maps that tell you which maps do what. Meta maps. And meta-maps of other meta-maps. It’s not turtles all the way down, but the meta-map sure looks like it.

I know next to nothing about Lacan, (neither do most of the undergrads, especially cinema studies, who reference him—meow) but metaphorically cartographic moments in a person’s life is when during childhood they ascend to the ‘mirror stage’ of development, where in they write a new map for the “other” and one for the “self”. This schism is representative of the constant production of maps throughout childhood and life itself. The notion that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is because, well, we have a lot of maps already. Going back to the necessity of giving only the precision a subject matter requires: Both Robert Downey jnr. and Meryl Streep admitted that when playing Julia Childs and Charlie Chaplain they opted to represent just one person’s view/relationship to/of them, not the totality of their person as is available through all biographical accounts: they opted for one person’s map of another person.

Marvin Minsky coined the term “Papert’s Principle” to describe how the greatest advances in mental growth may come from how we coordinate existing skills rather than learning new ones – which for the purposes of this analogy could be making better meta-maps. Indeed, he was a proponent of multiple representations, believing that this is invaluable because when one ‘map’ of method of problem solving fails, you can switch to another representation to find another means of solving it.

I find Papert’s Principle a very exciting idea, because it offers the promise that you don’t need to start from scratch learning things, you may only need better meta-maps. This suggests that sometimes your current method of thinking or problem solving aren’t fundamentally flawed, but simply misapplied – everything in its place – they are effective or useful in some situations but you’re using them in the wrong situations.

This of course leads to some horrendously vague questions about meta-mapping – to make an effective meta-map we essentially need to come up with a meta-decision making model that helps us determine what we term efficacy in any given task so that we can model which ‘map’ or way of thinking is most appropriate.

Meta-note: My apologies if I’ve overused the prefix ‘meta’ by this point

How then should we go about building our meta-maps? What might a specialized-map that leads us to building a meta-map look like?

At this point in the post I’m in the realm of pure speculation, I’m conworld-mapping^[4] rather than doing real cartography.

What might better meta-mapping look like?

The first step, I suppose would be auditing what our current meta-map looks like: what triggers or types of decision making do we currently use to determine which maps or specialized skills we use in different contexts?

If my enthusiasm for Papert’s Principle didn’t make it clear: I believe that a lot of my triggers or decision making patterns are ineffectual or should be improved – that’s why I came to this community in the first place. Your mileage (make your own map/journey pun here!) may vary. Embedded in that is of course some sort of ‘map’ or idea of what “should” is for there to be a chasm between expectations and results: and that map is ripe for investigation – how do I form those expectations? Are they justified? What situations or aspects of the territory of reality do they correlate to?

It is easy to speak about this in the abstract but I’m less sure how this would look like in practice – my map needs to have a better ratio – it needs to be more localized.

A final thought is of course, since I’m speaking about having a myriad of maps each of which pertain to specific situations, circumstances, types of decisions then it would follow that I should conjure another analogy to describe this.

The first non-library^[5] analogy that comes to mind is outfits. I was going to construct an analogy where our wardrobe and laundry and the clothes in our draws represent the myriad of maps of reality we have, and outfits are meta-maps, how we assemble an outfit is an expression or prediction of the situation we expect to be in. After all, clothes serve not just self-actualizing and sociological functions (i.e. wearing a band t-shirt to a concert) but practical functions (a scarf when you’re cold, a swimsuite for the beach, a dress with actual pockets). However I realized that this analogy falls apart when you consider the fringe case of how Stanley Kubrick, Steve Jobs, George Miller and Barack Obama all opted for a single uniform to reduce “decision fatigue”. I have failed to find a second map of this particular idea.

However, I still think it is important to consider how we must treat our metaphorical maps of reality as plural not singular, and that different ‘maps’ may pertain to even the same things; and that therefore how we map our maps is just as important if not more important than the maps ourselves.

Ultimately my dissatisfaction is that this analogy doesn’t reveal itself any novel or new ways of thinking about how to enhance or improve that meta-map.

Please let me know if any of this is insightful or at the very least interesting, even if it is in “it was wrong, but it pointed in a direction that could be profitable to me” and if you got this far, thank you for indulging me.

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I think Heidegger touches upon this, but there are also Gibsonian Affordances
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My apologies to any Freudians or Jungians here, it’s a pretty funny quip by the curmudgeonly Vladimir Nabokov in Strong Opinions:
“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. ”
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The actual quote—but I felt that it didn’t afford such precision: “[We must] not look for precision in all things alike, but in each class of things such precision as accords with the subject-matter, and so much as is appropriate to the inquiry. For a carpenter and a geometer investigate the right angle in different ways; the former does so in so far as the right angle is useful for his work, while the latter inquires what it is or what sort of thing it is; for he is a spectator of the truth. We must act in the same way, then, in all other matters as well, that our main task may not be subordinated to minor questions”
Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D Ross.
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I’m surprised that while there are words like “conlangs” and “conworlds” that “conmap” doesn’t appear to be a common term—https://wiki.conworld.org/w/Conworlds:Terminology#C
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I still remember having to physically go to the index card drawer to find the reference number for a book—this seemed like the most intuitive analogy I could draw, but it feels like it’s too “one-to-one” of an analogy with map-territory, and presumably the real advantage of having “different maps” of the same thing is the difference in how they represent it and what they emphasize or suppress. Lossily compressing for good.